3 things I’m looking forward to at the Webmaker workweek

Tomorrow I’m heading off to the icy wastelands of Toronto for a Webmaker workweek. As with everything at Mozilla, we’ll be planning and working in the open. You can see what we’ll be up to on this wiki page.

I’m helping the multi-talented Kat Braybrooke wrangle the Web Literacy Content ‘scrum’, but here’s what I’m looking forward to more generally.

1. Being F2F with colleagues

Working remotely is great, but virtual interactions differ markedly from embodied ones. I feel this acutely when I meet offline those I’ve only ever known online; it’s like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with one explaining the other.

We’ve quite a few new shipmates, but one I’m looking forward to meeting in particular is fellow Englishman Adam Lofting, our new Metrics Lead. We’re going to try and figure out (if and) how we can measure users’ development of web literacy. I think it will tie in nicely with the upcoming OpenHTML research project we’re doing with Drexel University.

2. Creating the Web Literacy Map user experience (UX)

Although this will mainly be led by the radiant Cassie McDaniel, I’m excited to see the ways we can weave the Web Literacy Map throughout the Webmaker site. Laura ‘super productive’ Hilliger has already produced an ‘if that then this’ demo, so I’m interested in how we can iterate towards a delightful UX for interest-based pathways to learning.

One thing I do think we need to do is to carefully consider the (visual and verbal) language we’re using. We’ve moved from Web Literacy ‘Standard’ to ‘Map’ and so we’ve got infinite scope for cartographic metaphors. 🙂

3. Thinking through the wider webmaker ecosystem

Webmaker (big ‘W’) is Mozilla’s offering in a wider webmaker (small ‘w’) ecosystem. Brett Gaylor‘s team has done a great job of creating innovative, open, stable tools; now we need to connect them more concretely to other people who are doing awesome stuff.

Happily, because Brett’s team has created a Make API this should be easier than it otherwise would have been. In practice, it means people can pull content out of Webmaker and we can pull in OERs and other openly-licensed content. Win.

Finally…

My apologies, Kat. I take it back: Canada is not a frozen wasteland. 😉

 Main image CC BY Roland Tanglao